I saw a Cybertruck

 I was driving to work yesterday, when I saw something odd coming towards me.  I actually went, "Holy shit," because it was a Cybertruck.  My guess, since they were heading towards the interstate, is that someone was on a road trip, and they needed to stop to use a restroom, or to grab some food, or whatever.  I very much doubt they were local, because I live in Pennsylvania, where it rains and/or snows.  Two things Cybertrucks apparently have difficulty with.  I also live in a rural area where trucks are used to haul large loads of hay bales, or firewood, or fill dirt.  And haulling large loads of things is something Cybertrucks also apparently have difficulty with.  I would say that people where I live have common sense and wouldn't spend what could get you a small house for, whatever a Cybertruck is supposed to give you, but about 80% voted for Trump, so ....

Having only seen one in real life, and only for a few seconds, I have to say ... it looked fucking ridiculous.  It looked smaller that I thought it would be, which somehow just made it stupider.  

A confusing sign

 I, unfortunately, live in a rather red part of Pennsylvania.  There’s a road that – depending on the circumstances – I either drive a couple times a week, or I go a couple of months not driving it.  But leading up to the 2024 Election, it became very depressing as I drove that road.  Months before the election, there were only a few Trump signs, but then in the last month, it seemed every other house had them.

One house, had a normal Trump flag, and they also had a large banner for, I think, Women for Trump.  I’m not completely sure what it was, because whenever I drove by it I either grimaced or flipped them off. 

Anyway, after the election I tried to ignore all these signs.  But, towards the end of the summer, I noticed something about this flag and banner: they were starting to fray.  Now I don’t know if it is because most people put a political yard sign up a month before the election, and then after the election they throw them away, so they’re not that tough to begin with.  I mean, who would have a political yard sign up for over a year?  Or, being Trump branded stuff, they’re probably made as cheaply as possible.  Either way, after eight or nine months, they were starting to show their age.  But the last time I went by – some fourteen months after the election – I only saw the corners of the banner still tied to some posts.  Two Pennsylvania winters had completely shredded it. 

Now normally, you’d expect the homeowner would take the signs down long before they got to this point.  If they were a normal person, they’d throw them away just to keep their yard nice.  Or if they wised up to the Trump shitshow they’d get rid of them too.  But you’d think if they were still drinking the Trump Kool-Aid, they’d replace them with whatever new crap he’s selling.  But none of that has happened.  There are still vehicles at this place, so I’d assume people still live there.  But they apparently don’t care to have some ragged sign in their front yard. 

Or maybe they’re just lazy.

What I believe

I’ve been thinking about making this post for some time.  With all the hate and evil in the world, and all the assholes in power, I thought I should make a quick list of where I stand on the important issues of the day. 

These are in no particular order, but I’ll start by saying I think people are people.  I don’t care if they’re white, black, male, female, trans, gay, ace, Muslim, Jew, atheist, born in America, born elsewhere, disabled, English speaker, non-English speaker, whatever.  I don’t care what people are, but what they do.  The only people I hate are the assholes.  I define assholes as people who hate people because they are black, or trans, or don’t speak English, or for whatever assholish reason they have. 

I believe the Palestinian people deserve to live in peace without fear of attack from their neighbors.

I believe the Israeli people deserve to live in peace without fear of attack from their neighbors.

I believe the Ukrainian people deserve to live in peace without fear of attack from their neighbors.

I believe the Iranian people deserve to live in peace without fear of attack from their neighbors.

Basically, I believe all peoples deserve to live in peace without fear of attack from their neighbors.

Climate change is real, and caused by humans.  I believe we could slow down, halt, and eventually even reverse the warming of our world, but that would require a bunch of billionaires to either make less money or just find less destructive ways to make money. 

Speaking of money, my economic philosophy is basically a rising tide lifts all boats.  Helping those at the bottom, helps everyone. 

The people who should decide if a woman has an abortion are the woman, her doctor, the father (except in rape cases), her legal guardian if she is underage, and whatever family/friends she wishes to discuss the matter with.  If there isn’t a politician in that group, then it’s none of their goddamned business.

There are places where AI could be used ethically for good.  Unfortunately, about 99% of AI is used to make worthless slop.

No one – kings, popes, presidents – is above the law. 

I do not have an issue with the death penalty for terrorists or mafia hitmen.  My feeling is that once you’ve killed X number of people, you’ve clearly forfeited your right to life.  What X is, I can’t say, which is why I called it a feeling.  I also have the feeling that if you are the leader of some country that invades another resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, I’d say that could also be grounds for the death penalty. 

I’ll end this with something I realized years ago.  Humanity has but two choices: evolution, or extinction.  If we don’t grow and become better beings, we’ll likely destroy ourselves.

Trump’s Hell

Last night, I foolishly checked social media for the latest news just before going to bed, and saw more of the evilness of the Trump regime.  As I was getting ready for bed, I started thinking of ways I’d love to just fuck with Trump.  What I came up with, was if I had the power – maybe I found a few dozen magic lamps and after I did what I could to make the world better, I’d save a few to fuck with those trying to destroy the planet – I’d make Trump have the same nightmare every night for the rest of his miserable life.  In it, he’d show up to the Pearly Gates and he’d see a bunch of people inside having the time of their … afterlives.  I’d say that two of these people would be Renée Good and Alex Pretti, but I doubt Trump even knows their names let alone what they look like.  So maybe there would be Jimmy Carter and other people Trump despises.  They would wave to him, maybe even motioning him to join them, but as soon as he takes a step forward, a giant hole opens up and drops him to Hell.

Once I was in bed, I started to wonder what Trump’s Hell would be like.  What punishments does he deserve?  This is what I came up with.  For an appetizer, there are probably a billion people who know enough about him to form some opinion on him.  And I think he should hear all of them.  It would start with some magat going on and on about how great he is, and then there would be a hundred people talking about what an evil shit he is.  At first, he’d probably just ignore the whining of libs, but then he’d find out what some of his inner circle really think of him, which I’d bet is most of them are just waiting for the shitty moron to die so they could use his death for their own political reasons. 

For the main course, I think everyone who hates Trump should be able to put as many suggestions they care to in a suggestion box for punishments.  And then Satan – or whatever demon he outsources Trump’s punishment to – just goes through all of them.  You’d have annoying ones like he plays a hundred rounds of golf with Obama, who always manages to beat him by one point, or however golf is scored.  And then the next suggestion would have someone like “The Mountain” swing a sledgehammer into his crotch, once for every thrust Trump made into a child.  Once that was done, Trump could then relive the last ten minutes of every person who died because of him.  Some would be gasping for breath after his piss poor handling of Covid, and then he’d be some fisherman having a beer, and then his boat explodes. 

So I had some nice thoughts as I drifted off to sleep.

Ads for AI

I watch a probably unhealthy amount of YouTube.  And since YouTube likes to put fourteen ad breaks in a twenty-minute video, I see lots of ads.  The vast majority of these ads are for things I have no interest in, or no use for, or are just stupid.  So I do my best to ignore them.  I would skip all that I could, but I do try to watch some so the creators get some revenue. 

A month or so ago, it seemed to me like I was seeing a lot of ads for some AI thing or another.  To the point it felt like a third of the ads were for AI.  So I decided to keep track of what I saw in the next 100 ads.  Out of those 100 ads, twenty-six were for random things like furniture stores or whatever.  Nineteen were for cars, while only ten were specifically for AI, although there were seven more for other tech stuff that might have had some AI in them.  It wasn’t a third, but it did seem like that night when I was tracking ads there was a lull in the AI ads.  Because in the weeks after I tracked the ads, it seems like it’s back to a quarter, at least. 

One of the new AI ads I’ve seen, is something I can’t get my head around.  Apparently, there’s now a washer-dryer that’s AI powered, or something.  Why?  The only thing I can think of, is they have sensors in the machine that allow you to basically hit a button and it will wash your clothes until they are clean, and then dry them until they are dry.  Instead of having a standard wash-dry cycle that you hope gets them clean and dries them completely, this washes and dries only as long as necessary.  That makes sense because that can save water/electricity/time.  If they called this IntelliWash, that would be great.  But since everything now has to be AI, they have to call it AI Wash, or whatever.  Now I know that there are some cases where “some type of AI” is just the right tool for the job.  The problem is, 99% of the stories we hear about AI is the “stolen hammer being used to pound in a screw” stories, so why would you want to call your fancy computer algorithm AI?  Can’t we find some other term for the good AI usages?

The other type of AI ads I’ve been noticing lately, have some business person in a meeting or whatever going, “Me no understand me job.  What me do?” And their AI assistant or whatever goes, “You should buy at $47.” And the person parrots back, “Me buy forty-seven.” I don’t know if it’s a devious scheme by the AI companies to try to tell other companies that “Your employees are complete morons who can’t do anything without AI.  You should just have AI do everything.” Because they hope that eventually AI will run everything, and when AI runs everything, those who control the AIs will control everything.  It’s either that or as an AI company, they don’t understand how businesses … business. 

My Trump Ballroom prediction

If the monstrosity is actually built, I’m betting that it will only be used a few times.  And someone at one of these events will report some of the issues with the building.  Given that it’s Trump, it will be hideously gaudy.  But there will also be odd things wrong with it.  Like, for some reason there will only be one bathroom and the gold-plated toilets clog every other use.  And half the building will be freezing while the other half is sweltering, and the only thing that can be done is to alternate which half is doing what. 

Come January 2029 when – hopefully – a Democrat is sworn in, they will have 8,000 other Trump fuckups to fix, so this ballroom will probably just be used for storage for six months or so.  Eventually, they’ll get a reliable building inspector in, who will almost immediately condemn it.  Like they’ll discover that these load bearing “marble” columns are just plywood with some cheap marble pattern stickers.  Given the shoddy construction, the only way it could cost $300 million is if the people building it were paid $20 a minute, or half the money for it “mysteriously disappeared.”

So this Democrat President will – after going through proper channels – have the building torn down.  The Republicans in Congress will decry the destruction of this “Wonder of the World,” but the President will hopefully utterly ignore them.  Once it is gone, they’ll dust off the blueprints of the East Wing – give it some updates – and build a New East Wing.  And hopefully it – and a new garden – will be ready for the President’s second inauguration in January 2033.

That’s one possibility of what will happen to the trump ballroom.  The other is that when – take your pick of any 100 impeachment worthy scandals – finally takes hold and it looks like he’ll finally be held accountable, Trump will “have a stroke” and will resign for his health.  And the first thing President Vance will do is pardon him, not because he did anything wrong, but to stop the meanie democrats from tormenting this sick, old man who, by the grace of God, is out playing golf just days after he was on his death bed.  But Vance is not Trump, and I’m betting that whatever corrupt schemes are involved with the ballroom won’t immediately transfer over, so it might not even get built and will just remain this blot on the landscape until the Democrat elected in 2028 eventually has the time to just build a new and improved East Wing.

Personally, I’m hoping for that second option, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Code Autopsy

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the new computer system we got at work.  Since the post was titled New and … worsened, you can probably guess that I had issues with it.  It seems that for every one thing the new system does better than the old, it does like ten worse.  And some of the worse things it does is, kind of odd.  Which is nice since it gave me another idea for a post.

To begin, I have to describe two things the new system does.  The first is it counts the money in the till.  This is pretty straightforward.  At the beginning of each shift we enter the amount of money in the till, and it just has to add on whatever we take in and subtract whatever we give out.  And when we get to a point, say twice what we started with, it pops up a message saying we have to do a drop.  To start the next transaction, we have to tap “Okay.” (An example of how the new system is worse, in the old system to do a drop I just had to hit like two buttons and enter a four digit code.  Now I have to hit like five buttons, and enter a dozen digit manager code.  So instead of doing three or four drops a night, now I just do one when I go on break.)

The second thing I have to describe, is we print a coupon on each receipt.  But instead of just having one coupon code THAT WOULD MAKE THINGS SO MUCH EASIER, each coupon has to be unique.  Meaning, for each transaction, our system has to call up the corporate system and ask for a unique code that will be recognized at every one of the thousand or so stores across the nation.  But sometimes, there’s a bit of a glitch somewhere in the system.  Either the corporate system is down, or there’s some communications issue, or whatever.  So the system will wait five seconds or so to see if it clears up, but if it doesn’t it will just print the receipt without the coupon.  Which makes sense since you don’t want the customer to just wait there for five minutes waiting for the problem to fix itself.

So those are the two issues I want to discuss.  Now, you’re probably thinking these have nothing to do with one another.  And you’d be right, except there’s something weird with our system.  See, if the communication system is down for whatever reason and the coupon isn’t printed, the “You have to do a drop” message won’t show up.  The first few times it happened, I figured I was missing something.  But communication glitches seem to happen two or three times each shift, so it wasn’t long before I noticed that these two things were somehow connected.  It took me a while to work out how they were connected, but I think what happens is there is a series of things the computer does after a transaction to set things up for the next.  And I think one of the last ones it does is to see if it needs to put up the “You have to do a drop” message.  But for some reason, when there’s a communications glitch, it ends up skipping the “Drop_Check_SubRoutine” or whatever.  It’s probably just one line of code that needs added, or fixed, that whoever designed the code never noticed because it worked 99.999% of the time.

All of this brings me to the idea behind the title of this post: Code Autopsy.  I’m sure that every corporation that has proprietary code for their stores/restaurants/warehouses whatever, there are lines of bad code that lead to weird/annoying/stupid problems that employees have just had to learn to live with.  Code Autopsy would be a show where a group of experienced coders are told of these problems, and then they go through the code to see what causes them.  And then, they see how to fix them.  Like I imagine the coupon/drop issue our system has could be fixed with one or two lines of code.  That’s probably all it would take.

Of course, there are several problems with this idea.  First off, few companies would be willing to have their code issues discussed in public.  They’d probably claim “proprietary” reasons, but really it would be the PR black eye of letting the world know they have “bad code.” Secondly, while this is my idea, I’d likely only watch the episode for the company where I work.  It’s an interesting idea, but not one I’d really be invested in.  Unless there’s a really big company with really fucked up code, it wouldn’t be a huge draw.

A new Constitution? Part 1?

Twenty some years ago, I had an idea for what became my Human Republic Universe.  I started writing stories set in this universe to flesh things out, as well as practice for the main thing, a TV series.  But I didn’t get too far, and other projects came up, and life, and stuff, so I haven’t done much in this universe for the last decade or so.  But that might change.

Anyway, the basic idea for my Human Republic Universe is that after World War I, the Leage of Nations was created, which failed to stop World War II.  After which, the United Nations was created, which also failed.  Now, World War III has been overused and has certain connotations, so my thing was that the UN failed to stop The Conflagration.  This was marked by a series of terrorist attacks, as well as numerous small to minor border wars.  And at one point, the US President does something – because America is always right – that really sours our relationships with some of our closest allies.

Anyway.

The Human Republic was to be this weak, planetary government.  Basically, it was to only deal with matters between the Member Nations and any interactions between them and any Non-Member Nations.  To become a Member Nation, you had to meet some requirements, like a democratic form of government open to all your citizens, as well as some basic rights like speech and religion.  And the citizens had to vote to join.  Any issue within a Member Nation would be handled by their government, with limited if any oversight from the Human Republic. 

At some point, I thought it would be interesting if I wrote up the Constitution of the Human Republic.  I figured I could start with the US Constitution, clear out all the racist shit, make some corrections, and have something – at least – I could start with.  But have you ever read the Constitution?  There’s old-timey words and spellings, as well as things that really should be fixed.  So I never got far writing the Constitution of the Human Republic.

It was probably that experience that gave me the idea of updating the Constitution.  Basically, just cleaning out the junk, updating the terminology, and adding the Amendments in to where they should go.  This was just a random idea I had that I never put much thought into.  Then that treasonous shitweasel won. 

A couple weeks later – once the initial horror and disgust had passed – I started thinking about a new Constitution again.  What I was thinking, is that at some point Trump will do something clearly and unmistakenly unconstitutional, and his bootlicks in Congress and the Courts won’t do anything.  (Apparently, they’ll just cheer so he can go on and do even more clearly and unmistakenly unconstitutional things.)  At some point, I imagine some Governor will announce that since the Constitution is no longer being followed, it means that the United States no longer exists.  They won’t succeed from the US, the US will just dissolve.  So I started writing a New Constitution for a New United States.  This would form – hopefully without bloodshed – from the old states, or from slightly changed new states. 

Turns out, this is harder than I expected.  For one, it’s difficult to balance putting in exact details for some issue, but leaving it flexible enough to handle future events I can’t imagine.  Or, there are some clearly good ideas – like Presidents not having immunity – that quickly get bogged down trying to figure out how to implement them.  Like if Presidents don’t have immunity, would that just open the floodgates of their opponents filing frivolous lawsuits to waste their time?  What’s the best way to handle all this?  I don’t know.  Somebody smarter than me will have to figure that out.

So here’s the first part of my New Constitution.  It gives some idea of where I’m going with things.  If people find this interesting, maybe I’ll try to finish it.  And if you have any suggestions, or want to point out some flaw, please do.  Maybe, just maybe, someone might take this as a rough draft for a real New Constitution.  Who knows.

***

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

 

Article I

Section I

This Constitution is a contract between the American people and the Government that serves them.  While not perfect, its heart is what many consider the essence of America: striving to be better.

 

Section II

All persons residing within a State at the time that State ratifies this Constitution, is a Citizen of that State and therefore of the United States.

All children born within the territory of the United States, will be Citizens of the United States. 

All children with at least one biological parent that is a Citizen, will be a Citizen of the United States even if born outside the territory of the United States.  Any dual citizenship status the child will have will depend upon the laws of wherever they are born.

All residents of a Non-State Territory that the United States claims, will be Citizens of the United States.  Every ten years, the Voters of Non-State Territories shall vote on whether to maintain the status quo, to become a State, to join an existing State, or to become independent of the United States. 

Any non-citizen who enters the territory of the United States at a legal entry point, may request to become a Citizen.  The exact process of becoming a Citizen will be set by Congress with reasonable stipulations.

Every adult Citizen has the right to renounce their citizenship.

Congress by a two-thirds vote in both chambers, may – for specific reasons – limit immigration from a region or country for a period of no more than one year.

For heinous acts, Congress by a two-thirds vote in both chambers, may strip a Citizen of their citizenship.  Bills to do this will apply only to an individual and may not be combined with any other bill.

 

Section III

All United States Citizens, regardless of where they live, upon reaching eighteen years of age, are Voters.  The right of a Citizen to be a Voter may not be infringed or removed for any reason.

 

Article II

Section I

All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a House of Representatives and a Senate.

 

Section II

The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every two years by the Voters of their State.  Each Representative shall have one vote.  No person shall be a Representative who – at the time of the election – hasn’t attained the age of twenty-five years, been seven years a Citizen of the United States, or spends less than nine months each year living in that State or Territory.  Representatives shall be limited to serving at most five terms from one, or many States or Territories.  

For the first four scheduled elections after a State ratifies this Constitution, being a Citizen of the State shall suffice for the citizenship requirement.

To determine the numbers of Representatives each State shall have, a census counting the total population of the United States shall be taken every ten years.  The State with the lowest population of Citizens will be taken as a Base Unit.  The population of Citizens each State has will then be divided by this Base Unit, and the resulting number – after rounding – will be the number of Representative for that State.

Regardless of their population, Non-State Territories of the United States shall only have one Representative.  This Representative shall be treated exactly as a Representative from a State.

Regardless of their number, all Voters who do not live within a State or Territory of the United States, shall choose one Representative.  This Representative shall be treated exactly as a Representative from a State.

The Voters of a State, Non-State Territory, or foreign residents may – by collecting a number of signatures in excess of 15% of the total votes in the most recent election – force a recall election of a Representative.  The result of such an election will go into effect when the election results are confirmed.

In the event of the death, resignation, recall, or impeachment of a Representative, the Governor of their State or Non-State Territory may appoint a Representative whose term may not exceed ninety days.  The office of a Representative may not be left empty for a period exceeding sixty days.  If a regularly scheduled election is not set to happen within one hundred and fifty days of the death, resignation, recall, or impeachment of a Representative, then a special election must be held to permanently replace the Representative for the remainder of the original term.  For outstanding circumstances, these restrictions may be altered for a seat by a majority vote in the House of Representatives. 

Appointed Representatives, or specially elected Representatives whose terms are less than six months, will not have that time count towards any term limits. 

If the next regularly scheduled election after a State ratifies this Constitution is more than one hundred and fifty days away, then the office will be filled in a similar manner.  The number of Representatives will be determined from the best available data until the next census.

With input from the Senate as well as the Executive and Judicial branches, The House of Representatives shall create a Code of Conduct/Ethics that will apply to all elected members of the government as well as members approved by the Senate.  This Code will be periodically updated.  Breaking of this Code by any member will be grounds for Impeachment. 

The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole power of Impeachment.

 

Section III

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Voters of that State, for a term of six years.  Each Senator shall have one vote.  No person shall be a Senator who – at the time of the election – hasn’t attained to the age of thirty years, been seven years a Citizen of the United States, or spends less than nine months each year living in that State or Territory.  Senators shall be limited to serving at most two terms from one, or two States, and or Territories.

For the first four scheduled elections after a State ratifies this Constitution, being a Citizen of the State shall suffice for the citizenship requirement.

In the first regularly scheduled election after a State ratifies this Constitution, each elected Senator shall randomly select if their term will be two, four, or six years in length.  This way, roughly one third of the Senate shall be elected every two years.  The two Senators from a State must be on different schedules.  Abridged terms of two or four years will count as a term in regards to term limits.

Non-State Territories of the United States shall only have one Senator.  This Senator shall be treated exactly as a Senator from a State.  In the first regularly scheduled election after a Territory is claimed, the elected Senator shall randomly select if their term will be two, four, or six years in length.

Regardless of their number, all Voters who do not live within a State or Territory of the United States, shall choose one Senator.  This Senator shall be treated exactly as a Senator from a State.  In the first regularly scheduled election after this Constitution is ratified, the elected foreign resident Senator shall randomly select if their term will be two, four, or six years in length.

The Voters of a State, Non-State Territory, or foreign residents may – by collecting a number of signatures in excess of 15% of the total votes in the most recent election – force a recall election of a Senator.  The result of such an election will go into effect when the election results are confirmed.

In the event of the death, resignation, recall, or impeachment of a Senator, the Governor of their State or Non-State Territory may appoint a Senator whose term may not exceed ninety days.  The office of a Senator may not be left empty for a period exceeding sixty days.  If a regularly scheduled election is not set to happen within one hundred and fifty days of the death, resignation, recall, or impeachment of a Senator, then a special election will be held to permanently replace the Senator for the remainder of the original term.  For outstanding circumstances, these restrictions may be altered for a seat by a majority vote in the Senate. 

Appointed Senators, or specially elected Senators whose terms are less than six months, will not have that time count towards any term limits.

If the next regularly scheduled election after a State ratifies this Constitution is more than one hundred and fifty days away, then the office will be filled in a similar manner. 

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.

The Senate shall choose their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore to serve in the absence of the Vice President, or when they shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.

The Senate shall have the sole power to try all Impeachments.  If the President or Vice President are on trial, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shall preside.  All other trials will be presided by the Vice President.  No person shall be convicted without a two-thirds vote.

Judgment in cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.  The judgment of an Impeachment trial may be used as evidence in a civil court.

 

***

And I’ll end it here, because after this it gets into the minutia of Congress’s power which is a bit of a headache.  But if there’s enough interest, I’ll work on it.  Well, I’ll probably work on it anyway and post it in six months.  We’ll see.

Fake dreams

I know people don’t care to hear about someone’s dreams, but I recently had an interesting experience I wish to share.  And a dream is a central point of it.

Anyway, I recently had a dream where some of my siblings found some badminton equipment.  My mom suggested having some sort of family tournament, but my brother pointed out that the last time we played tennis, Tim beat us 26-1.

A couple things about this.  First off, it has probably been forty some years since I’ve played badminton, and I don’t believe I’ve ever played tennis.  Secondly, I had the feeling that this was a cousin Tim and this happened at a family reunion, but I don’t think I have any cousins named Tim.  I went to school with a Tim, but I barely spoke with him then and haven’t spoken to him in thirty years.  The only other Tim I can think of, is a few years ago the manager at work was out for a few weeks for a medical issue, so the corporation sent in this other manager to cover.  This was a Tim, who was a bit of an asshole.  And lastly, in regards to the dream, I couldn’t care less about tennis, but 26-1 doesn’t seem like a tennis score.  Which leads me to think that “cousin” Tim was also a bit of an asshole and just kept playing until someone managed to score a point.

Now that that is all out of the way, the interesting thing I noticed was when I was groggily half-awake after this dream.  Because I had the overwhelming feeling that the whole “cousin” Tim story came from another dream I had like a month ago.  A dream I have no memory of, except as this vague reference.

This leads to two possibilities.  One, there is a part of our brains that remembers our dreams better than our awake brains does.  This doesn’t seem likely, because what would be the point.  So the more likely second possibility, is that when we dream of real events, our brain can pull from our real memories of them, but whenever a dream comes up with a “cousin Tim beat us at tennis at a family reunion” type event, the brain sort of panics when it can’t find the memory of that, so it just goes, “Oh, that was just a dream.”

I was really interested in this, because it seems once a month or so, I’ll wake up with the feeling that the dream I just had is a sequel of sorts to some other, forgotten dream.  I never looked too far into it before, because I think it always happened when I’m half-awake and things are always a blur.  But this time, for whatever reason, I was just awake enough to notice something was weird. 

I’ve spent the last five minutes trying to work “It was all a dream” into the ending of this in a satisfactory manner, but “It was all a dream” is rarely satisfactory.

I really am a gardener

I grew up on a farm and we’ve always had a garden.  The only time I didn’t have a garden was when I moved away for ten years.  For the first four of those years, I did have some house plants.  For the other six years, my apartment had a little balcony and I – pretty unsuccessfully – grew some plants, like potatoes and zucchini.  But about fifteen years ago I moved back to the farm to help my parents out and to have time to write.  And to have a garden.

Despite all my years gardening, it wasn’t until this week that I truly felt like a gardener.  I was at work thinking about all the things I had to do on my days off, and I realized, that even though it is barely spring and we still freeze a couple nights a week and I think there is snow in the forecast, I already feel like I’m behind in my gardening.  There are these … weed trees I’ve been trying to get rid of for the last few years, there’s some plants I want to move, there’s stuff left in the garden from last year I didn’t get around to cleaning up before the snow fell, I have raised beds I’m trying to fill, I want to move my compost bins, I need to get some seeds started, I want to get some cuttings off some apple trees ….  And it seems like every day I plan to focus on one of these things and be done with it, it rains.  Or I sprain my wrist and don’t feel like making it worse doing a bunch of heavy work.  I just need like two solid weeks of good weather, were I’m not injured, and I don’t have a hundred other things I need to be doing. 

Being a gardener is very tough.  I have no plans on quitting.

Short corn

 I planted our corn a little late, so it's not quite knee high yet.

Happy Fourth to everyone.

Where I stand on things

The idea for this blog began, like, five years ago.  It all started when a guy I used to be friends with and I had arguments on Facebook.  Basically, the way I somewhat jokingly put it, since I didn’t believe the current practice of capitalism wasn’t the bestest, most perfectest thing in the universe, I was just a dirty socialist who wanted to use the dark arts to resurrect Stalin.  At some point I realized that many of our disagreements stemmed from him just assuming my position on matters.  I didn’t agree with him, therefore I must think X, when in reality I’d often think Q.  And I didn’t fully understand his position on matters, but a large part of that was him refusing to tell me, even after I repeatedly asked him to.  Admittedly, part of why I wanted to nail down some of his positions was so I could point out any contradictions I could find.  I figured all of this out about the time he unfriended me.

Of course, part of why my positions on things aren’t easy to understand is because I don’t hold to some grand philosophy which dictates my views.  I know a couple of times he’d call me something like a, Ramsey-style neo-socialist, or something, and I’d have Google that to see what that even meant.  And often, I’d have to look up the explanation to see what it meant.  Decades ago, I noticed that people were rarely just X.  They were often X, subsection 3, paragraph VII, or whatever.  Which isn’t so bad, but often the X, 3, VIIs will see the X, 3 VIs as “The same as Hitler.” It seems so many disagreements – especially amongst those you’d think would be allies – are just battles over minutiae. 

So I’ve pretty much abandoned trying to explain myself in some neat, little box with fourteen layers of description.  Instead, my … ideology I guess, is summed up with stuff that would fit on a bumper sticker.  Which is probably annoying in that instead of having a solution for a specific problem, I’m more likely to wonder why that problem exists in the first place.  Or, I’ll want to solve some other problem that, two or three dominoes later, solves or greatly reduces the original problem. 

I’ve spent some time trying to explain that better, only to get more and more in the weeds or just sounding pretentious, so let’s move on.  These are the bumper sticker sayings that best explain my views on … life in general.

No ideology is perfect.

A sad moment was when I realized my former friend was an ideologue, because I view ideologues as … basically idiots.  The way to defeat an ideologue is to show that their ideology isn’t perfect.  If there was a perfect ideology, it would obviously be perfect and there wouldn’t be any questions about it.  No such perfect ideology exists, therefore, ideologues are defeated.  No matter how great your ideology is, there is a flaw in it that you conveniently overlook.

A year or so ago, I came up with the idea that in the Race of History, backing any ideology – be it capitalism or Catholicism – is backing the wrong horse.  The Racetrack of History is littered with dead ideologies, from feudalism to the Ancient Egyptian religion.  Why should the horses still running have a different fate?  I’d say it’s better to back the racetrack, the bedrock of reality.

And yes, I realize how stupid it is of me to say my ideology is that no ideology is perfect.  That’s the flaw I’m overlooking.

People are people.

I don’t care what skin color, gender identity, sexual identity, whatever identity you have, humans should all be treated like humans.  Admittedly, some humans are assholes, and I do my best to avoid/ignore them.  And while I will say I hate some groups of people, what I mean is I hate their ideology.  If pressed on the matter, what I really am is often just confused and saddened that so many people can’t see how idiotic/repugnant their ideology is: Flat-Earthers and Trump supporters, for example.  If they changed their ideology and stopped being assholes, I’d no longer hate them. 

Meaning is where you find it.

I think it was back in my college years, one day I was thinking about clones and wondering at what point in the cloning process could you “abort” the clone.  My clumsy answer to that evolved my stance on abortion.  I did write a blog a couple years ago with some of my thoughts on abortion, which explains things a bit more.  But the point of this is that my understanding of a real-world issue was changed by me probably thinking about the plot of some mediocre scifi story.  It’s often the little, personal, things that change us the most.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

This is basically my economic philosophy.  Would this policy help the poorest not be as poor?  Good.  Would this policy make the richest even richer?  They don’t fucking need it.

Probably a lot of people readily agree with that, but for those who don’t, let me give you an example.  I’m a writer with ebooks for sale.  For people to buy my ebooks, several dominoes need to fall.  They have to read English, have an interest in the types of stories I’m telling, have access to the internet, and to have enough disposable income to buy my books and enough free time to read them.  The people who have to work 80 hours a week just to buy food, even if they’d love my books, can’t afford to buy them.  So if the minimum wage was raised, that would increase the number of people who could afford to buy my ebooks.  And if I made enough money from my ebooks sales, I could afford to buy things I wanted.  All of which would make for a stronger economy. 

Do not knowingly harm others.

Our technology is evolving faster than our laws that govern the use of that technology.  Thinking about this, I realized that either we’ll continue making more specialized laws that will likely be outdated by the time the politicians get around to voting on them, or we could try simplifying our laws to broadly cover situations.  I wondered what the broadest, most simplistic law there could be, and I came up with: Do not knowingly harm others.  I thought that was a pretty good answer, until I started thinking about it.  What actually counts as harm?  Big things like murder and rape are clearly bad, but what about hurting someone’s feelings?  Years ago, an ex-girlfriend broke my heart.  Yes, that’s a part of life, but she did it in a way that left scars that, honestly, still haven’t healed.  She chose to do some things, even though a reasonable person would know I would be hurt by them.  If this law was in effect, could I take her to court?

Art is never finished, only abandoned. 

That is a line attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci.  And as a writer who’s read a story forty times and will still occasionally find a typo, I think that’s a perfect description of art.

A Space Junk Prize

 Some months ago, I wrote a post – A fun idea for a moon mission – about a robotic lunar program I would fund if I had billions to burn and wanted to help advance humans into becoming a spacefaring civilization.  The idea would be to 3D print bricks with actual lunar regolith to see how strong they would be.  I was thinking about this recently, and I wondered what other space missions I would fund – if I had billions to burn – to help humans in space.  What I came up with was the J-Prize, I guess, for space junk removal.

This would start with three small satellites, probably launched on an Electron rocket.  The first would be your basic cube sat, the second would be a larger cube sat, but with a solar panel sticking out so it would be odd shaped, and the third satellite would remain attached to the kick stage to help simulate a more massive satellite.  These would be put into slightly different orbits, but which are pretty much guaranteed to decay in the five-to-six-year range.  What exactly these satellites would do, I’d leave that to whoever builds them, probably schools or universities that I would give a free ride to orbit to.  There would be the understanding that these satellites would be given one year to function, but after that they would become targets for deorbiting tech demonstrations.  So they might function for the full five years, or get deorbited right after one year in orbit. 

The tech demonstrations would have three tiers.  The first tier would be to just inspect the satellites.  To that end, there would be symbols, or code phrases put on each.  Prelaunch photos of them would be blurred, and everyone who knows what they are would have to sign NDAs, so to get these codes you’d have to actually fly to these satellites.  And there might be two or three on each satellite, each worth X dollars.  For the third satellite, they might be big and easy to spot, but for the cube sat, they might just be a centimeter in size, so the imaging satellite would have to fly real close to be able to make it out.  So, unlike the other tiers which would pay out more for the larger satellites, for the first tier you’d make the most imaging the smallest.

The second tier would pay if you manage to deorbit the satellite early.  This could be accomplished by attaching some sort of drag, or attaching a small rocket to push it out of orbit, whatever.  The third tier would be if they manage to return the satellite intact to Earth. 

I have no idea what the exact prize amounts would be, but I’d say that the second tier would be more than enough to refund the cost of manufacturing the deorbiting satellite and launching it.  And, there would be bonus prizes.  Like, if a company successfully deorbits one of the test satellites, then for the next ten years they’d get $1 million for each piece of space junk they deorbit.  But if a company didn’t succeed with one of these test satellites, but they do succeed with some other junk within the next ten years, they’d get $500 thousand, or something.  Because the whole idea of this is to try to incentivize companies into finding ways to clean up space junk.  As such, I wondered if there should be a penalty if they damage a satellite and create space junk, but that would scare people off.  And that’s why these test satellites would be put into such short-lived orbits. 

So that’s my idea.  I’ll have to see what other ideas I can come up with to help humanity to become spacefaring, just in case I somehow become a billionaire and need some way to spend that money.

Balloon thoughts

First off, I do not have special information on this matter.  I’m just a guy who overthinks things.  And these are just some of my thoughts on the whole BalloonGate, or whatever it’s being called.

I heard somewhere that the Pentagon reported that there was one such Chinese balloon during Obama’s time in office, three during Trump’s, and the one during Biden’s.  But if I had to bet, I’d say that for everything the Pentagon tells us, there’s a thousand things they don’t.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the military has detected dozens of these balloons or more in the past ten years or so.  They just never said anything because why alert the world to your stealth detection capabilities?  I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a long meeting where they went through each balloon detection and ranked the likelihood that China knew that we detected it.  Like, China probably knew we had detected three of the previous ones, but we said four just to cause them to go through their data wondering which was the other one.  I don’t know how this recent balloon story broke – if it really was first spotted by civilians – or if the story was leaked by the Pentagon just because it was becoming unrealistic that we weren’t talking about it.  If the later, it was probably chosen in advance because we probably already have the detection capability for whatever the next level of stealth China has. 

Another reason we haven’t said anything about these earlier, is because we were probably feeding these spy balloons bad intel.  If they knew that we knew the balloon was there, they might not believe some of the stuff they heard.  But if they’re pretty confident that we didn’t know it was there, then they’re more likely to believe what they learn.  Something to keep in mind is that spycraft makes three-dimensional chess look like checkers, and some of the loudest voices in BalloonGate probably can’t even play checkers.

Some thoughts about Elon Musk

A year ago, I did a post titled Some thoughts on Elon Musk where I wondered if his talk about Mars was just a politician’s campaign promises?  A lot has happened since then concerning Musk, and I’ve thought about writing up some of my thoughts, but it seems like every day some new horrible thing comes out, and I worry I’d spend all this time making some coherent point only to have it buried under the day’s new shitshow.  But I had a couple of thoughts recently, and I figured I might as well share them.

My first thought was on his legacy.  As someone who occasionally writes stories set on a colonized Mars, I’ve been wondering – for some years – if I should set one in Musktown, or whatever.  Like in the past I’ve named things after Kim Stanley Robinson, or at least things from his Mars Trilogy.  But one thing that has been made certain over the last few months, is whenever humans do go to Mars, nothing there will be named after Musk.  I almost joked that maybe a sewage treatment plant, but honestly in a world where humans will need to recycle as much as possible, a sewage treatment plant will be a vital piece of infrastructure, and they’re not going to name it after some asshole.

My other thought was to wonder if some billionaire will one day fund a space mission to go out to Musk’s Roadster.  It would attach to the car and bring it back to Earth, just to burn it up in the atmosphere.  Hell, if you asked people to chip in $8, you could probably crowdfund the mission.

Why I’m staying on Twitter … for now.

 I first joined Twitter fourteen years ago.  And the main thing I use Twitter for is to vainly scream into the void hoping people will find out that I exist, and check out some of my books.  (Here’s my Amazon page, if you’re curious.)  To be perfectly honest, that hasn’t worked all that well.  Over the years I’ve tried to expand my presence on other sites, but none of them seemed as easy to use as Twitter.  Probably about a year ago, I decided to put more work into Twitter to have better/more content and to expand my follower base.  Since then I’ve put a lot of work into making my twittering better.

So of course, now is when it seems Twitter is going into a death spiral.  A lot of people are talking of leaving and looking for greener pastures.  Should I join them?  But where?  Facebook?  And be at the mercy of some other creepy billionaire with questionable morals?  Instagram?  I’m better with words than pictures, plus it seems like 95% of the people who follow me there are half-naked women trying to get me to check out their OnlyFans accounts.  Mastodon?  I’ve had an account for a while, but haven’t really done much there and don’t really have any followers.  Plus, I think I read that they don’t like you selling stuff there so my constant cry of “Buy my book” probably wouldn’t go over well.  Tribel?  I just started an account, so don’t have any followers, and it does seem like it is heavily politics centered, which isn’t really my thing. 

Right now, Twitter remains my primary social network, something that has taken me years to get to.  I can’t just jump to another one.  My hope is that sooner, rather than later, Musk will realize he’s in over his head and hire someone better suited to run the site.  I don’t have much hope for that, since I think he’ll try forty-seven increasingly odd ideas to fix a problem instead of just admitting he was wrong about something and undo a previous “fix.”

So I’m staying, hoping things get better.  Admittedly, I’m someone the assholes, haters, trolls, etc., have ignored because I’m not interesting enough to harass.  Or maybe since I’ve spent the last few years unfollowing/muting assholes I’m in a little pocket Twitter of decent people.  Who knows how long that will last.

Anyway, if you’re at all interested on finding me on the various networks, here’s my current list:

My personal Twitter, oneoveralpha

My writing Twitter, amanfewwords

Facebook

Instagram

Mastodon

Tribel